Let’s take another trip around the world as host Abha Thakor has a conversation with Artemy Kaydash, a WordPress and WooCommerce front end developer from Ukraine.
Personally, I love to hear the passion that he has for his work and his love for learning. Whether you have been developing for years, or deciding whether to jump into the Woo and WP waters, well, I believe you will get some wonderful inspiration from our guest today.
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Episode Transcript
Abha: It’s that time again. It’s Do The Woo and we’re carrying on our travels across the wonderful WooCommerce global space. And today we are traveling to the Ukraine and we have a young WooCommerce developer with us in the studio and welcome to Artemy Kaydash.
Artemy: Hi.
Abha: So you’re joining us today from Kyiv.
Artemy: Yep.
Abha: And this is also your very first podcast and a chance in the studio too.
Artemy: It’s an absolutely new experience for me, so I’m excited.
Abha: We’re absolutely thrilled that you’re with us today. Regular listeners Will know that we love hearing about people’s journeys and how they came to WooCommerce, but also how they’d encourage others to work in the space.
And we’ve got a treat for you today, because having talked to Artemy before we’ve got some really interesting gems to share. So we’re going to kick it off right back to when you started using WordPress, which was actually when you were 18.
Artemy: Yeah, I was 18. I was working as an intern in my college teacher’s web agency.
It was a very small web agency. There were maybe six or seven of us. And I asked the more senior developers that work there to help me to understand how things work there, because at that moment I didn’t know much about web development. I only started learning more about HTML and CSS, and I even didn’t know about the PHP and how PHP works at that time.
Abha: But the enthusiasm must have been at a quite young age to start doing this. What brought you to actually choose IT and choose the web? What was it that attracted you to it?
Artemy: Actually, to be honest it was a question of money. Because before I started working as a web developer, I was like a copywriter.
I wrote cheap and low quality SEO texts for websites. These texts that you have to include some keywords so a website could be more effective range in Google and other search engines. And then one of my friend talked to me he told me about web development, about PHP, and he say that it’s easy to start work with PHP because there are frameworks you can use.
You don’t have to be like, you don’t have to have a PhD to start working with PHP. So I decided why not. And I watched some YouTube videos about PHP development. And that’s how I started learning it. And then after maybe a month or so, I asked my college teacher to maybe he have some opportunities for me to gain some real experiences.
And he told me that he has a web agency and he would like to see me as an intern there. So that’s how I started my path in web development.
Abha: So you were obviously hooked on working in this area. I know clients and that interaction with clients is super important to you. And that’s always good to hear, especially for someone who is young in the industry.
And you feel that people should invest more time in their client interactions. How did that come about, that focus on wanting to work with clients, wanting to understand their needs a lot more when you were building sites?
I’ve been freelancing since I was 17, so I always knew how important it is to understand your client needs and goals because I don’t always have managers above me.
Sometimes I work with my customers directly, so I have to understand what they need and I need to translate their needs into tech solutions that will work for them. And to do this, I have to understand their business what problems they have, how they want to solve them. Because, sometimes my clients come to me and tell me that they want to build something or they want to change something.
And sometimes I have this sense that something is wrong here and I can ask them that what exactly do you want to achieve? What is your goal? And then when I hear what exactly they want, I can say that, your idea is probably not the best for you. If you want to achieve this, we probably should better do this and this instead.
So it’s establishing that dialogue with clients and being a partner along the way. And we’ve talked in a series a lot about how working with businesses rather than for them and being part of the solution that you find together, because actually that makes the job more interesting, but it also means that we often find a better solution.
Has that been your experience too, that clients are quite receptive to working together and finding something that will fit and work practically for them.
Artemy: You actually chose a very right word for this, a partner, because I treat my clients not just like clients, but as my partners because, I have my business as a freelancer and they have their own business. And actually we have the same goal. We are not competitors. We wanna grow our businesses together. And when I do my work greatly and they do their work we can achieve great results at the end. So there there’s the main idea behind what.
Abha: And I guess that also takes us back to the idea of the whole idea of open source and WordPress is that we collaborate together to find something that’s even better.
Artemy: Absolutely.
And I wanted to maybe mention my HeroPress essay that I wrote about actually the same topic. Because the main idea of this essay is that it’s great to be part of something bigger than just you.
It’s great to be part of a community because when you do something just for yourself you rarely can get great results, but when you’re a part of something bigger and you have your people that think the same way. Or maybe not the same way, but they have the same values.
You can get something great as WordPress, for example, because, I think that it’s hard to create something like WordPress when it’s something proprietary.
Abha: Now you predominantly work in the WordPress and the WooCommerce space. Has that been a good entrance for you into web development.
Was it something that was an easy jump or did you find that there are things that could have been easier to help other people make that move?
Artemy: As a developer. It was pretty easy for me because, there are more complex, more hard to understand platforms and frameworks. So WordPress is pretty easy to learn if you have motivation, if you’re ready to dive deeper. When I started learning WordPress I wish I had something that learn WordPress platform that we currently have because it’s great. It’s something official, it’s, when you read something on the word WordPress, you understand that this is the way that almost the whole community of things about some things.
And when I learned about WordPress, when I was learning about WordPress, there was nothing like this. There were like a lot of blogs and websites that teach you about how to do some things. I actually have a blog myself and I write about how to do some things that I may be stumbled upon before.
I had to understand this on my own, but I decided to share this knowledge with other people and maybe they can use my tutorials and blog posts to build something more complex and it will be great if I’m if this way I will inspire some people to write about their own experiences.
Abha: I’m sure you will, and that’s the joy of the Do The Woo community, is that we’re aiming to encourage new people existing people to work together, to learn from each other, and there is so much to learn and share, and we’ve all had very similar things we’ve had to learn. But approach it in different ways, and sometimes that different approach can help someone in a way that just reading a manual might not do.
And for anyone who hasn’t come across it, all you need to do is to type into that browser, learn.wordpress.org. As you say, learn.wordpress.org is a wealth of information and one that is growing and people can contribute to too.
And I know we’ve talked before the studio started today about how you would like to join in things like that as you can. And finding out ways that people can contribute, which they may not realize they actually can. So that is a great resource. And of course, one of the other great resources that is new in the WordPress space is the developer blog for WordPress. Stay tuned on this, because we’re going to be talking a lot more about that in coming months. Artemy, I’ve got another question for you, particularly about this idea that I want to expand on.
Learning PHP and WordPress is a constant process. Do you find that something that is inhibiting, especially for when you’re working with not just WordPress but WooCommerce? Or is it something that encourages you to be still in that space?
Artemy: You can always do your work better because basically PHP is pretty easy to learn.
It’s basics, just the language structure or something like this, the operators you can use and how you can use them together and so on. The hardest part here is that how do you properly use them, how to structure your code. How to structure your files. How to use different code patterns.
What best practices there are in the field. You can also use other programming languages and frameworks and platforms to understand how they do things. Maybe they do something differently. Maybe you can take some other ideas and try to implement them in WordPress. And this is also a big advantage of open source.
Because you can actually see how other people do some things
. You can go to their GitHub where you can download their plugins and themes from WordPress. org. And you can use it as an inspiration. You can see how more experienced developers do something. And you can use their practices in your own work.
That’s actually what I do. And also I work with WordPress for, since 2018. I still learn a lot and I still get to learn a lot.
Abha: But I guess that learning cycle keeps it fresh maybe. And also is something that makes our brains work a little bit more and be a chance to be more creative. Do you find that anybody who is put off by their, what they might think is a constant learning cycle for WordPress and WooCommerce, do you think that is something that they should be concerned about or do you have any advice for them on how to approach the learning side of it?
Artemy: All of us sometimes can be tired. That’s okay. Sometimes you may want to take a break from programming, from development. That’s fine. If you want to be a great developer. If you want to make more money, obviously you have to learn, you have to progress, you have to evolve.
And I think that maybe if a person is not motivated, maybe if they are not interested in this, maybe they should change something. Maybe they should change another other programming language. Maybe they should touch something else. Maybe when they try something else they understand that WordPress is actually better than this. I should come back.
Abha: Great advice because sometimes we think that other things are going to be easier until we try them. And that can make us be more creative in how we use the platforms that we were using in the first place.
Artemy: Absolutely. So even although we are all WordPress enthusiasts and we all think that WordPress is great, you actually should try another platforms to see how they do things differently and you can compare it to what WordPress have.
Maybe you can add something to WordPress that other platforms already have, but WordPress doesn’t have yet. Or maybe you can improve something in WordPress.
That’s a great call for action. So anybody out there listening to this, and if you find something on another platform and you think, actually, I can help build this on WordPress or WooCommerce, then the opportunities are there.
And it’s the great joy of being open source is that we can look at things and say, okay, this is where I can contribute. Your journey has been very interesting because your interests were actually very different to what a developer may have come from and what people may think the skill set is.
Because you have a deep interest in literature and sociology and philosophy, but a lot of people do jump careers and come from different backgrounds. How was it for you? How do you think that those soft skills also that you were learning before you did IT and that analytical skill and ability to think in the abstract, how does that help as a programmer?
Oh, it definitely helps you because at the end of the day, we all are humans. And we are interacting with each other and the better you understand other people the better you understand what motivates them The better you understand, how they can react to some things or something like this. These are for you to work with them. And you can achieve greater results when you understand all these things and I think it’s actually great when you do a career jump because you can have a very unique perspective on some things because when you work for a long time in the same area it kinda creates some blind spots for you because you can miss something and then it’s absolutely okay.
You can’t understand everything. You can know everything. So when a person from other professional areas. Come to WordPress, they can bring something new to our community. They can for example, if you were a marketer and you decided to work in WordPress, you can tell people that, guys, WordPress is great, but you can do your marketing better by doing this, and this, or for example, if you were a graphic designer.
You can tell the guys, WordPress is great, but something is wrong with your design. You can do it better by doing this, and this and so on. So it’s absolutely okay. And it’s it can be your advantage because you have your unique experience that most of other people do not have.
Abha: And it’s bringing those talents together, isn’t it? That’s so important and not just bringing them together, but also welcoming them and listening to what other perspectives are. And that’s, again, where the WordPress community and many other open source communities. That’s one of the positive things that we see and hopefully we can encourage.
You’ve also worked as a, mostly as a freelancer. Has the skills that you learned before been useful? But also, you’re obviously quite a social person and quite happy to talk to people. Does that make a difference in working in the space that you are?
Artemy: Yeah, of course as I said, it it allows me to better understand how to talk with clients, how to talk with my colleagues, how to better structure my work, how to better organize everything.
And as I said, I used to work as a copywriter and I read a lot and I write a lot. So this experience to absolutely helped me to launch my own blog because I already had some experience with this. So it wasn’t something absolutely new for me. I wrote about different topics, of course, when you write something, it’s still writing. No matter what you write about.
Abha: And it’s getting that practice. It’s almost that muscle memory, isn’t it? That if the more we write, the more we practice code, the more we read code and write on our blogs. That helps us in our critical thinking also in assessing what we’ve learned. And maybe also in having that confidence development.
Artemy: It’s actually a good point. There’s an idea that if you want to better understand something, try to explain this to someone else, because when you try to explain something, you understand that you have some areas you don’t fully understand, so you can’t even explain them.
And that’s when you understand that, I have to investigate this deeper. I don’t have a full understanding of what I do here. So maybe I’m doing something wrong. Maybe I can do something better here. So it’s you don’t have to block you. You can use your friends and explain what exactly you do to them, especially if they are not developers, because it will be something absolutely new for them.
And you. You will have to use terms that they will understand. And that’s actually great. If you work with clients and customers that are not tech savvy, because as developers always communicating with developers, sometimes we forget. That our customers are not developers and they they can not know the terms that we use.
They can not know concepts we use and ideas we use. And when you talk to them, you always have to explain everything in terms that they will understand. And you need to practice this, even if you have a manager, even if you have some people above you that will do this for you, you still need to practice this because it’s just a very valuable skill in our world.
Abha: It is. And I think those, what used to be termed as soft skills, but now actually are more seen as essential parts of business, essential parts of team collaboration. We do need to listen to each other. We do need to hear what our clients are needing, talking about what their future goals are. And part of that sometimes can be done, as you say, by talking to our own colleagues and talking to those around us who haven’t got a web development knowledge or experience and testing out how we’re explaining things.
Because it’s not always obvious. And that jargon is, and can be a significant barrier to people using products. Now, of course, we have the advantage with WordPress and WooCommerce is that the entry level isn’t that high to actually start using those products. And I know you found that in the areas that you work, but also in Ukraine, that WooCommerce was a very popular platform. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Artemy: WooCommerce is obviously popular here because it’s free. Some other platforms are also popular here because at least that’s what I heard from my friends. Or just people who I knew that they found WordPress hard to understand because the onboarding process is not always easy for people who are not tech savvy because WordPress is obviously a self-hosted solution. So you have to understand how to download WordPress, how to buy hosting, how to buy a domain how to install WordPress there, how to install a theme, how to install plugins, and you have to understand everything, and that’s what I think should do better in WordPress. We have to work on the onboarding process for users that are not tech savvy. We have to make all these processes as easier as possible.
Abha: And I think that’s the idea behind things like learn.wordpress.org.
Artemy: Yeah, absolutely. But I think that maybe I’m wrong, but learn WordPress is more for developers. And it’s great for developers.
Abha: That’s interesting. I think the idea is it’s for both, but absolutely I think this is where we all need to do more thinking around if people do perceive it as just for developers is the jargon in any of the support things that we’re doing too complex. And the other way around too are advanced developers finding these tools
useful? There’s also documentation and we have a fantastic documentation team at WordPress and again, it’s, they’re all contributors and produce an amazing amount of information, even in time for each release, which is a phenomenal amount of work and thanks to them as 6. 3 has just been launched and now working towards 6. 4. The documentation that I know that you also have looked at before, and the idea of continuing to study WordPress and PHP, and then using it in practice. Is that the key thing in your mind that it’s about doing that research. It’s about finding out how people use it in case studies and putting it into practice.
And then a review stage where you look at what worked, what didn’t work. And what else could you have learned? Does that pretty much sum up how you approach to dealing with these projects?
Artemy: Maybe it will sound a bit strange, but practice is about practice. So if you want to learn how to do something, you have to do something.
Abha: Absolutely.
Artemy: You will make mistakes, that’s absolutely fine. You will do something wrong. That’s absolutely fine. You, sometimes you will need to ask other people for their help. And that’s when you can use WordPress, Slack, or you can use Reddit, or you can use Stack Overflow or something like this, and you can ask other people questions.
And actually I answer to people’s question as well. I use social media to answer other people’s question. And sometimes that’s how I find new topics for my future blog posts. So do not be afraid of asking questions. That’s absolutely fine. We all ask questions, even I being a kind of experienced developer, I still ask questions. It’s absolutely fine.
Abha: And questions are a great way of learning and of course, finding out new ways of doing things that we may not have thought about or had the experience to work with. So you’ve talked to before about how WooCommerce and, It’s a great platform to use for anybody who wants to sell items in the Ukraine.
And we’ve talked before we came in studio today about the fact that you can layer, you can build on a product or a WooCommerce website quite easily, but also it gives an opportunity for people to expand their
businesses.
Artemy: Absolutely. WordPress and WooCommerce are open source. So if you want to extend something, or if you want to build something upon the core features, you can absolutely do this and you don’t have to do something additional to do this.
And all you need to do is to try actually. For example. If you want to add some more fields to your checkout form, there are many options here. You can install a plugin and just add it there. But actually, if you need just one little field, why would you install a plugin? If you know how to develop things, maybe it’s a good idea to learn more about how WooCommerce works under the hood.
Maybe you can try to add this field to using some custom code. Maybe you can edit your theme. Maybe you can create a plugin and use it for yourself. Who knows? That’s what I’m talking about. I think the best way to learn about WooCommerce as a developer, is try to do something.
For example maybe you have your favorite plugin that you always use. Try to rebuild it from scratch. It shouldn’t be the exact copy. But maybe there are some features that you really love, try to recreate them from scratch using your own code. And you can always use this plugin as a reference for you to see how the developers of this plugin created something.
And maybe you can do it differently. And it’s also a good idea to learn something like you can see that, okay, they created this future using this method. But maybe I can do it differently. Let’s see what will be the result of my idea. Maybe this idea will be bad. Maybe their initial idea will be better. But in this process, you will learn a lot of things.
Abha: And I think that’s got to be the theme for today’s podcast. It’s about practice and learning. And that not only makes us better at what we do and better with our clients and understanding each other and that partnership approach, but also adds a little bit more fun and excitement to what we do because it keeps it fresh.
Now, you are a very proud backend developer and I am intrigued with some of the stories that I’ve talked to you about, and I thought we could share today in the podcast. Not always do people look at the root of back end development, but it’s one that you feel is very strongly where you belong. What are the key things that excite you about that role?
Artemy: Retrospectively, when I was making my first steps in web development, I used to think that frontend is easier for me because as I said, I wasn’t a tech person back in those days. So I tried to write something in HTML and CSS, but also I learned about PHP and at some point I understood that frontend doesn’t inspire me.
I’m not saying that frontend is bad, there is a great demand in great frontend developers. Especially after Gutenberg was released because Gutenberg is written in React and you have to know at least the very basics of React, if you want to some create something great with Gutenberg creates blocks, for example, without using additional plugins.
But for me, I understood that there’s also great demand for backend developers because even though there are so many ready to use plugins in WooCommerce ecosystem, sometimes people that use WooCommerce, my customers, they have their own unique requirements and needs. And there’s just no ready to use plugins for them.
So that’s when they need a developer to build something custom, build something that wasn’t created yet. And WordPress being an open source allows you, when you understand the basic concepts behind WordPress, like meta fields, custom post types and other things. You can build almost everything with WordPress and WooCommerce and it’s very flexible. The other CMS and platforms I work with, they’re not as flexible as WordPress. Maybe the only thing that is as flexible as WordPress is just use a custom framework. PHP framework but it will not be so user friendly. As WordPress is. So WordPress is a combination of flexibility and easiness to use.
Abha: And it’s a great advert for anybody out there who thought, Hey, I’d like to try backend development, but not sure if it’s for me. And like many people out there, they get put off with thinking that you have to be very good at maths, or you have to be very good at a certain kind of engineering to work in development.
But it can be a learning cycle where as we’ve talked about today, you can keep looking at the search engine results, going to the resources that are there, watching videos that are available and talking to colleagues as well as attending local meetups and finding out how people do things and how they use it, which could improve what you do but also are an opportunity to share. what we’ve all learnt as well. One of the key things about Do The Woo is that we are very keen on encouraging the global community to be part of what we’re trying to do, and also feel included. The joys of having our guests. from such different backgrounds and such different countries is that we get to share a little bit about their typical work day, their experience, what they enjoy about WooCommerce.
And it does show quite often that we may be a very big community, but there’s a lot that brings us together and a lot that we can share and grow with together. Artemy, what is the favorite thing that you have about working in this space that you would like others to take away?
Artemy: In WordPress, there’s a great demand in freelance developers not just full time developers, but there are really many freelance jobs that you can use.
And I’ve always been a freelancer. And the freelancing lifestyle is what really sweets me, at least at this point of my life. So WordPress allows me to live the way I want and make money and progress in my career. So that’s why I love WordPress. Other platforms that I tried to use, didn’t allow me this.
Usually when you work with something else you have to work full time because the companies that work with this platforms, they want someone who will go to their office or something like this. But WordPress doesn’t make you to do this. You can be a freelancer or you can be a full time employer. That’s absolutely fine.
Abha: And I think that flexibility really fits in with our modern world now. And in this new environment that we’re often working in, it’s a chance for people to say, I want to combine this part of my life with working and to flip the balance when it suits them. And I think it’s great to hear someone who is more early parts of their career, though you have been using WordPress and WooCommerce quite a while now, talking about that joy of learning, but also of working it to suit your life at the moment.
Artemy: That’s very important that when you do something, it should feel like it’s natural for you because when you understand that something is wrong, something doesn’t suit you that’s usually a sign that you have to change something. Maybe you should try a different field.
Maybe you should do something a different way, but this understanding that your life is organic to you, that it’s good to you, there’s almost nothing that you want to change in this life it’s
always a good sign. It always means that you do everything the right way, and you’re on the right path.
Abha: I know you certainly feel that web development is your right path. And the joy that brings you is fabulous. It has been absolutely great to talk a little bit with you about how much you enjoy working as a backend developer and using WooCommerce.
Where will people find you on the web?
Artemy: I have my own website, kayart.dev. I also use LinkedIn. My name is Artemy Kaydash. You can find me there, but actually I think it’s easier to go to straight to my personal website because all of the social media I use, there are links there and you can follow me almost anywhere you want.
I also have some plans still on a YouTube channel. It just plans for now, but maybe you’ll see me pretty soon.
Abha: And hopefully doing and attending more of the things that the community are doing too as the opportunities come about. And I’m sure we’ll see you back here as well. We’ve talked about lots of different things.
It is that great about WordPress and WooCommerce is that you never know where it’s going to lead you and who you’re going to meet that will change your career direction or your interests. It’s a big space and there’s lots and lots of things to do. You’ve been here with us at Do The Woo. I’m Abha Thakor and do check the next lots of podcasts that we’re doing and if you have a story to tell and we haven’t been to your country yet, please do get in touch and we’ll be glad to see how we can come and talk to yourselves.
